[ExI] Trying for a minimum technical comment

[Mike Dougherty]

On Tue, Dec 18, 2012 at 12:41 PM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:
> When we are warm, well fed and comfortable, the conservative NIMBY crowd and

> who post on the topic, if you have the engineering expertise to do just
> top-level order of magnitude-ish BOTECs, do them and include the basis of
> your estimates.  For instance, if you suggest a lighter than air solar panel

I  have enginerring experience: i think of a lot of ideas that won't work.

This made me consider geothermal energy.  Instead of sending water
into deep holes in the ground and bringing warm water up to the
surface, can we just put the people underground instead?  How much
warmer would the living space be if instead of 6-8 inches of trapped
air in our walls, we had a few meters of earth?   Oh I know people
turn crazy without sunlight, but there's plenty of crazy even _with_
sunlight - and we're wasting a lot of energy on heat too.  Can
sunlight be transported over fiber optics?  Can LEDs effectively
simulate sunlight (the whole vitamin D synthesis and related, etc.)
I'm pretty sure I'd be happy enough living in a cave/subterranean
dwelling with HD LCD screens showing pictures of "outside" whenever I
was in the room (and off otherwise)  If I decided to "move" it'd be a
matter of getting my outdoors feed from a different camera.  We could
probably manage to make these 'windows' circulate air to simulate a
breeze to go with the on-screen appearance of that breeze.  Assuming
these smart spaces have enough bandwidth to keep Spike's info-nutrient
needs met, what am I missing?

Well, I guess digging earthscrapers (opposite of skyscrapers?)  could
be prohibitively expensive.  I agree, though energy shortages are
going to make everything expensive.  I'm not sure we have any simpler
"tech" than digging a really nice hole in the ground.